Thunder Dome
Readers of the Madison, Wis., Capital-Times had a scare on April 1, 1933 — a front-page photo showed that the state capitol had collapsed.
The words “April Fool” appeared in small type both in the caption and at the end of the accompanying article, but readers were not amused.
“There is such a thing as carrying a joke too far,” wrote one, “and this one was not only tactless and void of humor as well, but also a hideous jest.”
Sea Story
Published in London’s Wide World Magazine in 1898, Louis de Rougemont’s adventures in Oceania made a sensation: He had witnessed octopus attacks on the pearl fishers of New Guinea, rode turtles while a castaway on an anonymous Pacific islet, and spent 30 swashbuckling years as a god-king among Australian cannibals. Here he’s beset by migrating rats:
It was impossible for me to observe in what order the rats were advancing, on account of the great stretch of country which they covered. Soon, however, their shrill squeals were distinctly heard, and a few minutes later the edge of that strange tide struck our tree and swept past us with a force impossible to realise. No living thing was spared. Snakes, lizards–ay, even the biggest kangaroos–succumbed after an ineffectual struggle. The rats actually ate those of their fellows who seemed to hesitate or stumble. The curious thing was that the great army never seemed to stand still. It appeared to me that each rat simply took a bite at whatever prey came his way, and then passed on with the rest.
In September an F.W. Solomon wrote in to say that he recognized the author — he was a Swiss manservant named Louis Grien whose nearest approach to the Outback had been a stint as butler to the governor of Western Australia. After some temporizing, De Rougemont vanished; he reappeared the following year in a South African music hall, billing himself as “The Greatest Liar on Earth.”
Oops
In 1800, robber and housebreaker Pierre Coignard was sentenced to 14 years’ hard labor in the prison at Toulon. After five years he escaped, journeyed to Catalonia, assumed the identity of a local nobleman, won glory fighting in the Spanish ranks, entered the French army, rose to become a decorated colonel …
… and was recognized in Paris by one of his former cellmates.
He was tried, convicted, and returned to the same prison he had escaped 18 years earlier.
The Baron of Arizona
After discovering a talent for forgery during the Civil War, James Reavis headed west and started one of the most ambitious hoaxes of all time. He invented a Spanish nobleman named Miguel de Peralta, devised his entire family tree, and began assiduously forging documents claiming 10 million acres of prime Arizona land for the don’s descendants. Then he traveled throughout Spain and Mexico, carefully seeding libraries and archives with the forged deeds, mortgages, and wills.
When all was ready, he went before the U.S. surveyor general in 1881 and showed that rights to these lands now belonged to him. He imposed taxes on residents throughout Arizona, including the Southern Pacific Railroad and the Silver King Mine, but when their lawyers sought to challenge the claims they found Reavis’ carefully forged documents on file.
The ruse made Reavis one of the richest land barons in Arizona, and soon he’d bought mansions in New York, Washington, St. Louis, and Mexico. But it all lasted less than 10 years, unraveling in 1890 when a Spanish linguist detected the forgeries. Reavis served six years in prison and spent the rest of his life on the streets of Santa Fe.
“Reported Capture of the Sea-Serpent”
In February 1852, the New York Tribune published an account by a Charles Seabury, master of the whaleship Monongahela, of a titanic struggle with a sea serpent in the South Pacific. The crew harpooned the 103-foot monster on Jan. 13 and killed it with lances the following morning:
None of the crew who witnessed that terrible scene will ever forget it; the evolutions of the body were rapid as lightning, seeming like the revolving of a thousand enormous black wheels. The tail and head would occasionally appear in the surging bloody foam, and a sound was heard, so dead, unearthly, and expressive of acute agony, that a thrill of horror ran through our veins.
The serpent was too large to get into port, so the crew resolved to save the skin, head, and bones. As they were dissecting the creature they encountered the brig Gipsy, to whom Seabury gave his story. “As soon as I get in I shall be enabled to furnish you a more detailed account.”
That’s the story. But neither Seabury, his serpent, nor his detailed account ever appeared, and the Gipsy later told the Philadelphia Bulletin that it had never met such a ship. By that time the original 2700-word account had run in Galignani’s Messenger, the Illustrated London News, the London Times, and Spenerishe Zeitung.
Zoologist editor Edward Newman concludes, “Very like a hoax, but well drawn up.” You can decide for yourself — the original account is here.
Every Minute
In the 1840s P.T. Barnum found himself a victim of his own success. His New York museum of curiosities proved so popular that it was regularly filled to capacity and could admit no more customers.
Barnum studied the problem and hired a carpenter. Soon a new door appeared in the museum with a sign reading THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS.
Those who followed it found themselves on Ann Street.
The Lying Nun
Canada saw a sensation in 1836 — a woman named Maria Monk claimed to have been a nun in a Montreal convent where priests from the nearby seminary would enter through a secret tunnel, force sex on the terrified nuns, and dispose horribly of any resulting children:
[Father Larkin] first put oil upon the heads of the infants, as is the custom before baptism. When he had baptized the children, they were taken, one after another, by one of the old nuns, in the presence of us all. She pressed her hand upon the mouth and nose of the first so tight that it could not breathe, and in a few minutes, when the hand was removed, it was dead. She then took the other and treated it in the same way. No sound was heard, and both the children were corpses. The greatest indifference was shown by all present during this operation; for all, as I well knew, were long accustomed to such scenes. The little bodies were then taken into the cellar, thrown into the pit I have mentioned, and covered with a quantity of lime.
Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk became a bestseller, but an investigation showed that the whole thing had been a fake; Monk had apparently never even visited the convent. She fled to Philadelphia, wrote an unsuccessful sequel, had a child out of wedlock, and died in 1839.
Boo!
“Spirit photographs” created by hoaxer William Hope in 1919.
From left: Mr. and Mrs. Gibson with their deceased son; Mrs. Longcake with her dead sister-in-law; the Rev. Charles Tweedale and his wife, with her father.
Arthur Conan Doyle (below, center) defended Hope even when skeptic Harry Price had shown that he was manipulating his plates. “The credulity of dupes,” wrote Edmund Burke, “is as inexhaustible as the invention of knaves.”
The Silent City
In 1885, explorer Richard Willoughby claimed to have discovered a wonderful mirage above Alaska’s Muir glacier: He’d seen a modern city, he said, with buildings, church towers, vessels, even citizens. This photograph sold “like hot cakes” in the summer of 1889, and Willoughby sold the negative to a San Francisco photographer for $500.
There it all unraveled. An American consul, home from England, noted that the “silent city” bore a striking resemblance to Bristol. It turned out that Willoughby had paid an English tourist $10 for an overexposed photo of his hometown, and the rest was hot air. Still, he deserves credit for invention.
Romance at Short Notice
Bata Kindai Amgoza ibn LoBagola told an inspiring story: Born in West Africa, he wandered to the sea at age 7 and found himself aboard a steamer bound for Scotland. From there he made his way to the United States, where he took up lecturing. His 1930 autobiography, LoBagola; An African Savage’s Own Story, gives vivid details about life in the bush:
“If you should climb a tree, the lion can easily get help from the elephant, because the elephant and the lion are friendly. … [T]he lion tells the elephant that it wants you down from the tree, and the elephant shakes the tree or pulls it up by the roots, and down you come.”
The truth was more prosaic: His real name was Joseph Lee and he was born in Baltimore. “Small opportunities,” wrote Demosthenes, “are often the beginning of great enterprises.”
The Cardiff Giant
Workers were digging a well in New York in 1869 when they made a sensational discovery: a 10-foot man made of stone.
Was it an ancient statue? A huge petrified human? The truth turned out to be more mundane: The “Cardiff Giant” had been carved out of gypsum and deliberately buried by a New York tobacconist named George Hull. He turned a good profit: His $2,600 investment sold for $37,500 when it was “discovered.”
The continuing hysteria drove profits higher, and P.T. Barnum offered $60,000 to lease it for three months. Rebuffed, he built his own plaster replica and decried the original as a fake, leading exhibitor David Hannum to grumble, “There’s a sucker born every minute” — a remark later misattributed to Barnum himself.
Eventually the whole thing blew over; by 1870 both giants had been revealed as fake. But the old gypsum carving still makes a good show — it’s on display today in a Cooperstown, N.Y., museum.
Boo!
That’s Mary Todd Lincoln with the ghost of her husband, as captured by “spirit photographer” William H. Mumler.
The story goes that Mary sat for the photo in the early 1870s, when she had taken the name Lindall, and that the photographer didn’t know her identity until the exposure revealed the martyred president.
That’s the story. Skeptics immediately accused Mumler of fakery, and he didn’t win any friends with his new career, “revealing” the ghosts of Civil War dead for their grieving families.
That practice was too low even for P.T. Barnum (!), who testified against Mumler in a fraud trial in 1869. He was acquitted, but he died penniless in 1884.
Perhaps Mumler really had discovered an astonishing new technique … but it seems telling that his own ghost has never been photographed.
No Such Address
When Gregor MacGregor returned to England from the New World in 1820, he brought auspicious news: He had been created prince of Poyais, a Central American nation of 12,500 square miles.
The Scottish soldier became the toast of London and was soon entertaining dignitaries at elaborate banquets. He published a glowing guidebook, raised a loan of £200,000 for his new government, and began selling land rights to excited settlers.
But when two ships arrived at the described location in 1823, they found nothing but jungle. Lacking shelter and beset by disease, the settlers had to be evacuated to British Honduras, and only 70 of the 250 survived. A warning reached London in time to stop five additional ships from making the voyage.
A furor erupted, but by that time MacGregor had left for France, where he attempted the same hoax. Officials there locked him up, but he was acquitted at trial and brazenly returned to England, where he kept up similar schemes through 1837. He died, blithely, in Venezuela in 1845.
Counterfeit Indians
Grey Owl (1888-1938), left, a pioneer in Canadian conservation, turned out to be Archibald Belaney, a farmer’s son from Hastings, England.
Two Moon Meridas (1888-1933), right, a promoter of herbal medicines, was really Chico Colon Meridas.
Meridas must have been pretty convincing — when he was indicted in 1932, 26 Sioux spoke in his defense.
Shell Game
In the 1920s, American painter and eccentric Waldo Peirce gave a turtle to the concierge of the building in which he lived. She was delighted with the gift and took great care of her new pet, and she did not notice when Peirce secretly replaced it with a slightly larger turtle. This continued for some time, with Peirce sneaking successively larger turtles into her apartment while she praised her miraculous pet to the neighbors.
Then, after a suitable pause, he began using smaller turtles.
The Un-Hoax
In 1883, the assistant telegraph editor of the Boston Globe invented the story of a volcanic eruption in the South Pacific, purportedly related by the captain of a freight steamer. Editorial writer Florence Finch Kelly later recalled:
The tale he told was truly one of horrific happenings — what looked like a whole island blown into the sky, showers of ashes that darkened the sunlight and covered his decks inches deep, great blocks of ice in the midst of red-hot streams of lava, the ocean bubbling with heat from these torrents of fire, tons of fish killed by the heated ocean water and floating dead on its surface, and many another marvel fit to make even a tough old sea captain’s eyes pop from his head.
The story filled several columns on the Globe‘s front page, and it was picked up in New York, London, and Chicago. Only later did reports arrive of a catastrophe in Indonesia: “With his imaginary volcanic eruption, Mr. Soames had closely hit in time and place the explosion of Krakatoa, the greatest volcanic eruption of modern times, and in his account he had included many phenomena that were paralleled in later descriptions of the actual outburst! Did the vagaries of chance ever direct the long arm of coincidence to a more amazing result?”
(UPDATE: In Media Hoaxes [1989], Fred Fedler reports that the editor’s story was based on early cables from London regarding the volcano’s eruption. He embellished the cables’ scant information with surmised details based on library research, and these proved to be surprisingly accurate. So the truth is much less impressive than Kelly’s account — or than that published by Frank Edwards in two books in the 1950s.)
Unmasked
London conjuror Chung Ling Soo was famous for his “bullet catch” illusion: Audience members would mark bullets that were loaded into a gun, which attendants then fired at Soo. He would appear to catch the bullets and drop them on a plate. In fact, Soo palmed the bullets during the marking, and alternate bullets were loaded into the gun, which was rigged to swallow them and fire a harmless gunpowder charge.
That worked fine until March 23, 1918, when the gun didn’t swallow. A live audience in the Wood Green Empire watched the attendant shoot Soo — who staggered and said, “My God, I’ve been shot” in English. Not only had he faked catching bullets, William Robinson had faked being Chinese for 19 years. He died the next day.
Bad News
In the 1890s, William Randoph Hearst’s New York Journal was in a circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. When the World published an obituary of “Reflipe W. Thanuz,” Hearst revealed a trap — there was no such person, so Pulitzer must have stolen the item from his paper. (“Reflipe W” is “we pilfer” spelled backward, and “Thanuz” is “the news”.)
Pulitzer got his revenge, though. He planted the name “Lister A. Raah” in a World story, and when the Journal ran a similar item, he revealed that the name was an anagram of “Hearst a liar.”
See also Nihilartikels.
George Psalmanazar
Anyone can lead a fascinating life if he’s willing to invent it out of whole cloth. Or at least that’s the lesson of George Psalmanazar, one of the stranger figures in European history.
Born in France in 1679, Psalmanazar traveled to Scandinavia in 1700 and perversely told everyone he was from Formosa. And he didn’t stint on details. In Formosa, he said:
- Horses and camels were used for mass transportation.
- Men walked naked, covering their privates with gold and silver plates.
- The chief food was a serpent, hunted with branches.
- A man could have many wives; if any was unfaithful he could eat her.
- Murderers were hung upside down and shot full of arrows.
- Formosans sacrificed 18,000 young boys to gods each year, and priests ate the bodies.
Psalmanazar eventually found he could make a career of this; he gave lectures and wrote a book that went through two English editions and was translated into French and German. To keep up “Formosan” appearances, he ate raw meat, slept upright in a chair, and claimed to worship the sun and moon. Eventually, though, he gave up the charade, confessing in 1706.
To this day, no one knows who he really was — he never gave his real name.
Smile
In 1911, Argentine con man Eduardo de Valfierno found a way to steal the Mona Lisa six times over at no risk to himself.
First he made private deals with six separate buyers to steal and deliver the priceless painting. Then he hired a professional art restorer to make six fakes, and shipped them in advance to the buyers’ locales (to avoid later trouble with customs).
In August he paid a thief to steal the original from the Louvre, and when news of the theft had spread he delivered the six fakes to their recipients, exacting a high price for each. Then he quietly disappeared. The flummoxed thief was soon caught trying to sell the red-hot original, and it was returned to the museum in 1913.
Journalism the Easy Way
On June 25, 1899, all four major Denver newspapers, the Times, the Post, the Republican, and the Rocky Mountain News, ran front-page stories saying that the Chinese were planning to demolish the Great Wall of China and build a road in its place.
They weren’t, obviously — the hoax was dreamed up by a cabal of bored reporters — but the story survived and even spread. Two weeks after the Denver publication, a large Eastern newspaper picked it up, adding confirming “quotes” by earnest Chinese and including its own illustrations and comments. Soon the story had spread throughout the United States and even entered Europe.
The full truth didn’t emerge until the last surviving reporter revealed the hoax.
Triple Word Score
Rupert Hughes’ 1954 Music Lovers’ Encyclopedia contains what might be the most outlandish English word ever seen: ZZXJOANW. Hughes claimed it was of Maori origin, pronounced “shaw” and meaning “drum,” “fife,” or “conclusion.”
Logologists accepted this for 70 years before it was exposed as a hoax. Who can blame them? The English language contains about 500,000 legitimate words, including monstrosities like MLECHCHHA and QARAQALPAQ. Better luck next time.
The Upas Tree
In the 18th century, tales circulated of a terrible tree in Java, so poisonous that it destroyed all life within 15 miles. It grew alone in a desolate valley, surrounded by dead bodies; there were no fish in the streams nearby, and birds fell from the sky. The upas tree’s poison could be harvested only by condemned criminals wearing leather hoods fitted with glass eyeholes, and scarcely a tenth of these returned.
Lord Byron and Charlotte Brontë popularized this account, and so did Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus, but the truth is more prosaic. There is a upas tree, but its poison is generally only dangerous if you receive it via an arrow. It lives in Southeast Asia.
The exaggeration can be traced to one man, a French surgeon named Foersch who published a florid account in the London Magazine of December 1783. He was either sly or gullible — it’s not clear which.
The Steps Experiment
In 1977, Los Angeles freelance writer Chuck Ross submitted a typed manuscript to 14 publishers and 13 literary agents. Ross claimed it was an original work, but in fact it was a freshly typed copy of Jerzy Kosinski’s novel Steps, which had won the National Book Award in 1969.
All 27 recipients failed to recognize Kosinski’s work, and all 27 rejected the manuscript.
Sadly, this is nothing new. From Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, September 1888:
A disappointed literary aspirant, weary of having his articles declined with thanks, and doubtful of his critics’ infallibility, copied out ‘Samson Agonistes,’ which he rechristened ‘Like a Giant Refreshed,’ and the manuscript, as an original work of his own, went the rounds of publishers and editors. It was declined on various pleas, and the letters he received afforded him so much amusement that he published them in the St. James’s Gazette. None of the critics discovered that the work was Milton’s. One, who had evidently not even looked at it, deemed it a sensational novel; another recognized a certain amount of merit, but thought it was disfigured by ‘Scotticisms;’ a third was sufficiently pleased to offer to publish it, provided the author contributed forty pounds towards expenses.’
